W onderground has published an extract from James Golden’s The View from Federal Twist — a chapter that turns the usual hierarchy of garden writing on its head and lets the garden answer back.
“You have to learn to let the garden be protagonist,” James Golden writes. “This is humility — allowing the ‘other’ to take precedence, perhaps seeing the garden as a symbol of something larger and much more important.”
It is the line the book keeps coming back to. Federal Twist is a clearing of heavy, wet clay in western New Jersey — the kind of site that resists the gardener’s plan and rewards anyone willing to listen to it instead. The chapter on Wonderground shows what that listening looks like in practice: a garden made not by composing plants like furniture but by working with what wants to grow, intervening sparingly, and letting the place do most of the design.
You have to learn to let the garden be protagonist. This is humility — allowing the ‘other’ to take precedence, perhaps seeing the garden as a symbol of something larger and much more important.
— James Golden, The View from Federal Twist
Read the full chapter at Wonderground. The View from Federal Twist is published by Filbert Press.
